carefree jaunt.’
‘Schoenberg told Dillen that his involvement in the Ahnenerbe was purely scholarly, and that he joined the Nazi party only because refusal was impossible.’
‘Didn’t a lot of ex-Nazis come to Canada?’
‘Quite a few former prisoners of war were allowed to come here after they were released by the Soviets in the late forties and early fifties. Plenty of them made new lives for themselves and the last thing they wanted was to hark back to the war. But there were some, including former SS, who remained diehard Nazis. Unlike released prisoners who went back to Germany – who saw the devastation and then the years of reconstruction, who themselves were part of the creation of the new Germany – some of those who went abroad after their release still lived in a fantasy world and refused to accept what had happened. I knew former German soldiers in Canada who would still openly celebrate Hitler’s birthday.’
‘Schoenberg?’
Jack paused. ‘It’s hard to imagine how anyone who let slip that their greatest exhilaration was during their time working for Himmler could not be nostalgic, whatever they may say about being coerced. You’ve just been reading about the real purpose of the Ahnenerbe: to provide Himmler with so-called evidence for racial superiority that he then used to justify the Final Solution. When you see that old man today, remember the pictures of the concentration camp at Belsen, and those terrible images Maurice saw in the forest bunker. That’s what the Ahnenerbe was really all about. But we have to try to keep our cool. We’re here because he wants to tell us something. We have to encourage him to talk, not to clam up.’
‘He’ll presumably expect some questions about his Nazi past,’ Costas said. ‘I’ve got some fresh in my mind from that book. It would be odd if we didn’t ask him something. That might raise his suspicions.’
Jack nodded. ‘Just don’t lay it on too thick.’
‘You could show annoyance with me for doing it. Might help to get you into his confidence, to open him up.’
Jack nodded. ‘Whatever he says in response to queries about his Nazi past we have to take with a pinch of salt. But I doubt whether we’ll need to tease the truth of his convictions out of him. Those will come anyway, little words here and there, more openly if he thinks he’s in like-minded company. He’s very old and has been living as a recluse for more than twenty years, probably inhabiting that world of his past more and more in his mind. Anyway, I want to play him on something else. We have to find a way of bringing up the Brotherhood of the Tiger. I’ve expected Shang Yong to be on my tail ever since we took out most of his business assets two years ago, and the Brotherhood is just the kind of outfit Saumerre would contract after his disappointment with the Russian hitmen last year. Ben told me he thought he’d seen the tiger tattoo on a man in the airport concourse at JFK when he arrived there with Rebecca from Istanbul.’
‘You suspect Schoenberg is involved with Saumerre?’ Costas said.
‘It’s just a hunch. Frau Hoffman knew about him, and knew he was still alive. If they are the last survivors of those who may have been close to Himmler’s scheme, then we have to remember that Saumerre – and before that his father and his grandfather – have been on this trail for years. If we know about Schoenberg’s background and where he lives, then Saumerre almost certainly will too.’
‘You think Saumerre may have got to him and offered some kind of deal?’
Jack throttled down and let the engine idle for a moment, marshalling his thoughts. ‘This is what I think. I think the fantasy world of the Nazis, all that nonsense at Wewelsburg Castle, disguised a terrible truth of ego and poisonous ambition in Heinrich Himmler. But I think that fantasy world was so embedded in the young men and women whose minds were warped by the Ahnenerbe that it will still be there in those few who survive today. Schoenberg may well have something genuinely exciting to tell us, as Dillen himself firmly believed, something about Atlantis that still burns within him because of the fervour for finding an Aryan proto-civilization that was kindled in his soul during his formative years. He could hardly have avoided being influenced by the Ahnenerbe, not only by the ideology but also by the compulsive, almost manic excitement that surrounded it, an infectious enthusiasm it would be hard for a young man to deny. For him, re-stoking that enthusiasm might be important now because he’s an old man harking back to his youth, and that’s something we can exploit. But there’s another, darker possibility: that the fantasy for a select few was also to be part of a terrifying vortex of escape and rebirth that Himmler had contructed for himself, one that required men like Ernst Hoffman to bring it to fruition.’
‘And you think Schoenberg may be one of those.’
‘I don’t know. He may just be a retired scholar with a past that was beyond his control. But if I’m right and Saumerre has got to him, then we have to be doubly cautious, because he could be playing us too.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘We’re looking for the site of Atlantis reborn, right? The place where the survivors of the exodus inscribed those symbols we know from Atlantis in the Black Sea, symbols that Himmler’s Ahnenerbe archaeologists who discovered the new Atlantis copied in that secret chamber in Wewelsburg that Frau Hoffman showed us. We know from her that the new Atlantis was where Himmler decided to build his secret hideaway, the destination for the U- boat dispatched with Hoffman and his deadly cargo in the final days of the war. We know that he shrouded the place with the mystique of Atlantis, which had for so long been the obsession of the Ahnenerbe, a mystique that may continue to motivate a man like Schoenberg. We’re on this trail now with such urgency because of the deadly virus that may have been successfully delivered by the U-boat to this new Atlantis, a virus Saumerre desperately wants to get his hands on. A man like Schoenberg could be caught in between, ignorant of the deadly biological weapon and Himmler’s true purpose, but passionately believing in the association of the place with the dream of revealing the Aryan roots of civilization that he now wants to see fulfilled before he dies.’
‘So you think Saumerre could have made a deal with him.’
‘I think Saumerre may have told him to give us all the information he has. Remember, Saumerre wants us to find this place. He has his contracted thugs, the Chinese gangsters of Shang Yong, but he doesn’t have the resources or the expertise to follow the archaeological trail we’re now on. He’s watching and waiting for us to get there. As soon as he knows enough to allow him to organize the logistics needed to get his men in place with the right equipment, he’s going to have a go again at kidnapping Rebecca so that he can blackmail me into revealing the location. It’s why I asked Mikhail to get Rebecca out of school to his place in the Adirondacks. I’m not going to let that happen again.’
‘You’d give away the location if it came to it?’
Jack gave him a steely look. ‘I have a plan.’
‘Okay. Just keep me in the loop.’ Costas looked out, shading his eyes, and pointed ahead. ‘That must be it now.’
Jack saw a narrow strip of beach on the shoreline to the right, and the eaves of a low wooden house in the forest behind. He turned the boat towards the beach, throttled down and stood up, one hand on the tiller and the other holding the painter line to steady himself. He steered into a small cove beside a spine of rock jutting into the bay, and then brought the boat against a small floating dock. He sat down, flipped the gear lever to neutral and threw the painter line to Costas, who leapt out and secured it to a wooden post. After switching off the engine, Jack climbed out, and together they made their way along a rickety boardwalk towards the beach.
He clicked on his cell phone and paused to read two urgent text messages, one from Lanowski and one from Katya. He called Costas back. ‘Incredible stuff. It really takes us forward. You remember Lanoswki’s Plato code, the idea that Plato and Solon before him embedded Pythagorean messages in their texts? Well, take a look at this. He’s found a code in Solon’s text, the Atlantis papyrus that Maurice and Aysha discovered in the desert five years ago.’
Costas peered at the message. ‘He says it’s a simple geometric code, easy enough to understand if you play chess in three dimensions. Typical Lanowski. For easy, read impossible. Sounds like he’s found a soulmate in Solon.’
Jack scrolled down. ‘Lanowski translates the ancient Greek as The priestess prophesied that the new Atlantis would be founded over the western ocean, where the palladion becomes heavy again and where the two mountains form a saddle and two peaks like the horns of a bull.’
‘That’s what Lanowski thinks Solon was told by the high priest at Sais, but that he instructed Solon not to write it down because it was sacred.’
Jack nodded. ‘It’s fantastic. Remember the weight of meteoritic iron along the North Anatolian Fault, at Atlantis, and the shape of the volcano? It may simply be saying that the new Atlantis will be founded at a site very
